Xu Bing will discuss his 9/11-related installation on Tuesday night at the Museum of Chinese in America (photo by Jeff Morgan)
Exhibition: Spinning Wheel Building, 5 West 22nd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves., Tuesday – Sunday, September 8 – October 9, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
Artist Talk: Tuesday, September 13, Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre St., free with RSVP, 6:30
www.insite.lmcc.net
www.mocanyc.org
Chinese-born artist Xu Bing, who is based in Beijing and Brooklyn, incorporates words and history into site-specific installations that examine language and politics in unique ways. In his current work at the Morgan Library, “The Living Word 3,” the characters depicting the Chinese word for “bird” lift off the ground and fly to the ceiling as they morph into birds themselves. In 2004, Xu installed “Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?” in Wales, consisting of dust that represented debris from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, accompanied by a Zen poem, examining the tragedy itself as well as its aftereffects on a shocked world. Xu has now reinstalled the poignant work in the lobby gallery of the Spinning Wheel Building in the Flatiron District in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, in conjunction with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s month-long “InSite: Art + Commemoration” series, which continues through October 11 with exhibitions, live performances, poetry readings, and other events that look at how artists have dealt with 9/11. On September 13, Xu will be at the Museum of Chinese in America to give a special artist talk with professor Lydia Liu about the project’s first installation in the United States; admission is free with advance RSVP.
From 1967 to 1975, a group of more than two dozen Swedish journalists came to America to document the civil rights movement. More than thirty years later, director and cinematographer Göran Hugo Olsson discovered hours and hours of unused 16mm footage — the material was turned into a program shown only once in Sweden and seen nowhere else — and developed it into The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, a remarkable visual and aural collage that focuses on the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement, a critical part of American history that has been swept under the rug. Olsson and Hanna Lejonqvist have seamlessly edited together startlingly intimate footage of such seminal figures as Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael, including a wonderfully personal scene in which Carmichael interviews his mother on her couch. But the star of the film is the controversial political activist Angela Davis, who allowed the journalists remarkable access, particularly in a jailhouse interview shot in color. (Most of the footage is in black and white.) Davis also adds contemporary audio commentary, sharing poignant insight about that tumultuous period, along with Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets, singer Erykah Badu, professor, poet, and playwright Sonia Sanchez, Roots drummer Ahmir Questlove Thompson (who also composed the film’s score with Om’Mas Keith), and rapper Talib Kweli, who discusses specific scenes in the film with a thoughtful grace and intelligence. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is an extraordinary look back at a crucial moment in time that has long been misunderstood, if not completely forgotten. The filmmakers will be at the IFC Center for the 8:15 and 10:20 shows on Friday and Saturday night to talk about the work. In conjunction with the film’s opening, 
